Review of the Year April 2000 – March 2001 508964AR.CHI 8/23/02 12:18 PM Page *2
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508964AR.CHI 8/23/02 12:18 PM Page *1 THE ROTHSCHILD ARCHIVE Review of the year April 2000 – March 2001 508964AR.CHI 8/23/02 12:18 PM Page *2 Cover Picture: Mr S. V. J. Scott, a Clerk at N M Rothschild & Sons, photographed at his desk in the General Office, 1937 508964AR.CHI 8/23/02 12:18 PM Page *3 The Rothschild Archive Trust Trustees Emma Rothschild (Chair) Baron Eric de Rothschild Lionel de Rothschild Professor David Landes Anthony Chapman Staff Victor Gray (Director) Melanie Aspey (Archivist) Elaine Penn (Assistant Archivist) Richard Schofield (Assistant Archivist) Mandy Bell (Archives Assistant to October 2000) Gill Crust (Secretary) The Rothschild Archive, New Court, St. Swithin’s Lane, London EC4P 4DU Tel. +44 (0)20 7280 5874, Fax +44 (0)20 7280 5657, E-mail [email protected] Website: www.rothschildarchive.org Company No. 3702208 Registered Charity No. 1075340 508964AR.CHI 8/23/02 12:18 PM Page *4 508964AR.CHI 8/23/02 12:18 PM Page *5 CONTENTS Introduction ..................................................................... 1 Emma Rothschild, Chairman of the Rothschild Archive Trust Review of the Year’s Work .................................................. 2 Victor Gray The Cash Nexus: Bankers and Politics in History ......................... 9 Professor Niall Ferguson ‘Up to our noses in smoke’ .................................................. 16 Richard Schofield Rothschild in the News....................................................... 22 Melanie Aspey Charles Stuart and the Secret Service .................................... 24 Robert Franklin The Clementine ................................................................ 27 Melanie Aspey Whatever happened to Sarah?............................................... 28 Vic Gray Principal Acquisitions, 1 April 2000 – 31 March 2001 ................ 30 508964AR.CHI 8/23/02 12:18 PM Page *6 508964AR.CHI 8/23/02 12:18 PM Page 1 INTRODUCTION Emma Rothschild, Chairman of the Rothschild Archive Trust The Review of the Year for 1999/2000 recorded the establishment of the Rothschild Archive Trust, the generous donation to the Trust of the archives of N M Rothschild & Sons Limited and the opening of the Rothschild Archive in its new premises in St. Swithin’s Lane. To coincide with the opening, a Guide to the collection was published and the Archive launched its own website. These steps represented a remarkable stride forward in bringing the Archive to the attention of a wider audience and helping it fulfil its potential as a major resource for historians. In 2000/2001, as this second edition of the Review demonstrates, the Director and staff of the Archive have maintained the momentum, with the active help and support of many who have recognised the significance of what the Trustees are attempting to achieve: the gathering together in a safe haven of the records of a family which has had the opportunity to play a part in many aspects of the history of the last two hundred years, and the creation of a centre for research to explore them to the full. This year, with the publication of the Guide behind them, the staff of the Archive have been investigating various routes by which the content of the Archive could be more fully explored. One approach is reflected in Richard Schofield’s article in this Review and other pilot projects are recorded in Vic Gray’s account of recent work in the Archive. The Trustees have also continued with the work of building the collections - adding new papers both from within the Rothschild family and its businesses and from other sources. As the record of acquisitions shows, members of the family have responded well to this objective and during the year the collections have been considerably enriched by new deposits of papers. We hope this will be the beginning of a collective effort to make the Archive as comprehensive and useful a research centre as possible. The pursuit of other related material has taken the Archive into new and unexpected fields. Collaboration with the Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek in Frankfurt has yielded microfilm of a remarkable international collection of press cuttings recording the activities of the family over a period of many decades. Collaborations of this sort will be a keynote of the Archive’s programmes in future years. None of this would have been possible without the continuing generosity of N M Rothschild & Sons Limited in funding the administration of the Archive, for which the Trustees once again record their deep gratitude. This year has also seen the early stages of development of a capital fund which, one day, may allow the Trust to move towards a greater measure of self-sufficiency. The reintegration of political history and financial history is one of the genuinely exciting new opportunities for historians of the modern period, as Professor Niall Ferguson demonstrated this year in his lecture at The Rothschild Archive on Bankers and Politics. So is the reintegration of national and international or global history. The Rothschild Archive can in both respects, we believe, become a very substantial resource for historical scholarship and public understanding. REVIEW OF THE YEAR APRIL 2000-MARCH 2001 1 508964AR.CHI 8/23/02 12:18 PM Page 2 Review of the year’s work Victor Gray, Director of the Rothschild Archive This has been the first full year of operation of King and the Infanta; a growing economic crisis in The Rothschild Archive in its new premises in St. Cuba and the damaging effect on the Spanish Swithin’s Lane and under the aegis of the economy of flour and sugar production in Cuba; Rothschild Archive Trust. Both have contributed competition between the mines of Almadén and to a sense of renewed confidence and direction those in California; the working of Spanish among the small team whose task it is to explore railways (in which the Rothschilds had significant the content of the archive and to develop and interests) including news of rail accidents and exploit its potential as a source for researchers. disasters; and military conspiracies, student disturbances and teachers’ walk-outs in Madrid. Cataloguing A second pilot, concerned with Rothschild involvement in the world of commodities, looked Following the publication last year of a Guide to at what records among the archive would provide the Archive, efforts this year have been focused on evidence on the bank’s engagement in the 19th a number of pilot projects which will help define century tobacco trade. The results of that pilot are priorities and methodologies for ‘drilling down’ described in an article by Richard Schofield on into the detailed content of the collection so as to page 16 of this Review. This approach has proved strike the richest seams for future research use. a valuable way of identifying for researchers the sources in the Archive on which they might Work on the series of letters from the Rothschilds’ concentrate and will undoubtedly be repeated Madrid correspondents, Weisweiller and Bauer, with other commodities. during the years between 1881 and 1892 was reported in last year’s Annual Review and was A third route explored has been biographical in completed during this year. approach, taking individual members of the family, in this case Lionel Nathan (1808-1879) and The firm, in its various manifestations, was in his son Alfred Charles (1842-1918) and providing, regular and heavy correspondence with both the alongside brief summary biographies, details of the London and Paris Houses of Rothschild from 1833 archive sources which can be explored to pursue to 1929 and the quantity of surviving letters, some further research into their lives and activities. in French, others in German, is vast. The pilot The results will be made available in leaflet form project, which also dipped into the series received and via the website. by and sent from de Rothschild Frères in Paris, gave some considerable insight into the Yet a further approach being tested is that of information-gathering methods and the executive attempting a detailed listing of correspondence functions of the two banks and pointed the way to relating to a particular year or event. Given the further work which might be done. degree to which historians and myth-makers alike have seen links between the family’s banking The immediate fruits of the project were a activities and the ‘Year of Revolutions’, 1848, this substantial indication for researchers of the was an obvious subject for a pilot project. Work is, complexity of the reports to be found in this at the year end, well under way and will be series. For the year 1884, for example, matters reported on next year. discussed or reported included an outbreak of phylloxera in Málaga and of cholera in Alicante, The results of these pilot projects will now inform with stringent quarantine restrictions; an decisions for work in the Archive in coming years. earthquake with 900 victims; the sickness of the 2 THE ROTHSCHILD ARCHIVE 508964AR.CHI 8/23/02 12:18 PM Page 3 The Judendeutsch Letters Project presented to Lord Rothschild on the occasion of his 70th birthday in 1910. Together they form a The central project to which the Archive has been remarkable collection of examples of this Arts and committed for some time remains the work of Crafts calligraphic fashion. transcribing and translating the letters between the five Rothschild brothers, written to each other on an almost daily basis during their rise to banking pre-eminence and in the years up to the death of the last of them, James, in 1868. Work has most recently concentrated on the early years, between 1814 and 1818, the target being the completion, by the end of 2001, of a complete set of German transcriptions and English translations of the 2,000 or more letters from that period, linked electronically to scanned images of the originals so as to allow further editorial and research work to be carried out.